


An Equal Weight

by Nevcolleil



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, The Host AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:41:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28394043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevcolleil/pseuds/Nevcolleil
Summary: "...I can not do what I have done to you to another human being. Not now that I understand what it means to you. And you could not love me if I could."Castiel will do anything to restore Dean's free will now that he's fallen in love with his human.Before Dean fell in love with the angel, he would have said he'd do the same.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 3
Kudos: 33





	An Equal Weight

Dean hadn't known that there was a fear he could feel worse than he'd felt with angels closing in on him and Sammy from all around, that day he was taken.

That was different, though. There was a chance then, at least, that he could lead the fuckers away from his brother. It meant throwing his body off the top of a four story building, and damned if Dean knows how he even survived, but it was a _chance_.

There's nothing Dean can do now. Cas has control of his body. Cas has control of his mouth.

"... and you must not tell the others," Cas says. "I fear that they would not understand."

' _I don't understand_ ,' Dean thinks at the angel, as hard as he can. ' _Cas, goddamn it, don't you do this!_ '

"I- Castiel, I can't do that..." Chuck looks miserable even to have been asked, and Dean can't blame him.

"If you wish to know how to save your friends... how to expell my brethren from their bodies, then this is my condition. I must die."

' _Cas, you stubborn sonofa- PLEASE_ '

Dean begs and pleads inside of his head, where no one can hear and think less of him for it. No one except a suicidal angel, who's apparently determined to be dead by the time Dean comes back to himself.

' _Peace, Dean_ ,' Cas thinks back to him. ' _Trust me as you've trusted me before. This is the only way_.'

' _No_!!'

"But if we can get angels out without killing their vessels, why can't we get you out the same way?" Chuck asks, and Dean wants to cheer. "Wh- Why can't we just send you back to Heaven like the others. I-"

"No." This time it's Cas who protests - loudly and certain. Chuck stares at him with wide eyes, and inside of him Dean wishes again that he could scream. Just once. Just to warn Sam and Bobby what Cas is planning. He's their friend now. They would stop him. Chuck's trying to do the best thing for everybody, but he doesn't know what Cas is thinking. Angels don't lie. It's not in their nature.

Except Dean must have rubbed off on this angel more than Cas will admit, because Cas _is_ lying now - to Chuck and to Dean, Dean can feel it.

Cas doesn't have to die to help them. He wants to.

Dean doesn't even have to try to tell Cas how that makes him feel. The pain is so sharp, so surprisingly complete, that Cas not only senses it but understands it on his own.

' _I love you too Dean_ ,' the angel thinks, sounding as anguished as Dean feels. ' _But I can not do what I have done to you to another human being. Not now that I understand what it means to you. And you could not love me if I could._ '

Out loud, Cas says, to Dean and to Chuck both, "Even if I were welcome in Heaven, after how I have bonded with my human, I would be alone. An abomination among my kind."

' _Cas..._ '

"And before my grace could fully be restored, Dean... Sam... Bobby and Ellen and you, everyone at this compound will have been dead for many years. I have lived and left many lives... But I have never lost someone that I care about. That is one first I do not wish to experience on Earth."

Dean wants to call Cas selfish, but he can't make himself do it, no matter how frightened he becomes when Chuck finally agrees.

"If... if you're sure. If I can't- can't talk you out of it-"

' _Please, Cas, listen_ ,' Dean makes one last request. ' _I don't mind sharing. I really don't. Forget what I said! Stay with me. Tell Chuck you've changed your mind and just stay..._ '

Cas is just as afraid as Dean is. So afraid he's willing to die and let Dean be the one to lose someone he cares about. Again. But Cas is far from selfish. Everything that's happened to him since he was placed in Dean's body has happened because he consented to help Dean. He could have let Naomi put him in a different vessel when she offered, before he knew anything about love or family, and he wouldn't be facing death now or feeling guilty for living in someone else's skin.

"You cannot," Cas says.

There's nothing Dean can do.

After they practice the procedure on a woman who calls herself Meg when she is awakened, Cas gives his bogus speech to Sam and the others, letting them say their goodbyes while they think he's just abandoning them to go back to Heaven.

On Chuck's examination table, Dean feels tears on his cheeks, and outside his body, Chuck can see Dean crying like a baby. Maybe some of those tears are Cas's, but they're Dean's too, and Dean couldn't care less who the hell sees.

' _Don't go, Cas.._.' are his last unspoken words to the angel. ' _I love you, you stupid bastard. Don't go_.'

As he turns Dean's head so that Chuck can begin the extraction process, Cas thinks, ' _I love you too, Dean. I am sorry_.'

Dean wakes up, and immediately he looks to his left where he knows the holy relic Chuck wasn't supposed to use should be sitting.

Sam sees Dean's hazel eyes and sags against Bobby's side.

"Dean..."

"Sammy." Saying his brother's name, the way he says it (nobody calls Sam 'Sammy' but Dean) is a privelege that Dean thought he might never experience again.

And yet, he can't bask in this moment the way he might have before he _fell in love with_ the frickin' angel who took the privelege of free will away from him in the first place.

Dean sits up. "Cas," he says. "Where is he?"

"He's... on his way back to Heaven, boy," Bobby answers, sounding less certain and more unhappy the more he talks and watches Dean freak. "I thought you've been in his head these last few days. He said you knew-"

"Yeah, he also said he was goin' back to Heaven, but instead he asked Chuck to kill him."

"He what?" Sam and Bobby ask pretty much as one.

Everyone's eyes turn to the prophet, but Chuck's already got his hands up.

"I didn't!" he yells quickly. "I swear it! I- I promised him I would... I still could-" Chuck sees the look on Dean's face, swallows, and shakes his head. "But I didn't! He's- he's in the relic. We can do the ritual and send him off to Heaven or-"

Dean likes that or. Yeah, it was Cas's wish to bow out gracefully or some shit, but he can bitch at Dean about that after they've got him back. In a body Dean can actually hold in his arms, like he's been dreaming about since he realized how he feels about his angel.

"Or?" Sam asks.

Chuck slowly lowers his arms and smiles.

"Let me show you."

\--~--

Cas opens his eyes, and instantly knows that something is wrong.

Primarily because he opens his eyes.

His vision is hazy at first. Everything around him is a soft, white glow, and the voice he hears he cannot immediately place. He knows only that it elicits from him a feeling of warmth and belonging that he has only ever felt in two places. One was in Dean's body, with his human, but as Cas can no longer sense Dean in his brain, there is only one place that Cas can be.

And that is in Heaven.

Cas closes his eyes again and wants to wail.

Pain unlike anything he experienced as a human assaults him with breathtaking finality. He is not dead. But by now, Dean must surely be.

And yet that voice is still present, and now that he is more lucid, Cas can definitely identify it.

"Cas? Come on, man... Open your eyes again. Look at me, please."

"Dean?"

The hope Cas feels is crushing. The sounds coming out of his mouth are not in Dean's voice and yet Dean is with him.

Cas looks in the voice's direction and prays, as he hasn't since deciding to reunite his vessel with Dean's family, that his hopes will not be dashed.

Dean's face slowly comes into view.

It is the most beautiful sight Cas has seen in many eons.

"Hey, you..." Dean says, seeing him finally awake and aware. The human's grin could light up a room.

Not that Cas gets to see it for long before Dean crushes their mouths together.

Kissing. It had been pleasurable when Jo had tried it while Cas was inside Dean's body. But now that it is Dean kissing Cas while he is in-

Finally, the implications of these surprising developments sink in and Cas realizes what Dean must have done.

"Dean- Dean, no..." Cas pulls away from their kiss, and as soon as he has gotten over the strangeness of hearing the low, gravelly tone of his new voice, seeks out Chuck in the room where he has awoken.

It is the panic room, and Cas is lying on one of Chuck's examination tables. Sam, Bobby, Chuck, Ellen and Jo are all present.

"Chuck, you gave me your vow-"

"Sorry about that, big guy," Chuck says, not looking sorry. Cas is momentarily distracted by the question of whether Chuck would continue to call him by this nickname as he had while Cas was inside of Dean. "They kind of twisted my arm."

Sam smirks. "Right."

"Well, they would have! Tell me Dean wouldn't have broken all my fingers if I killed his boyfriend!" Chuck is quick to defend himself to Sam.

"I would have broken your neck," Dean says, although he's smiling.

Bobby and Ellen actually laugh.

"See!" Chuck squeaks, pointing. As if he actually thinks Dean or anyone else in this room would hurt him.

Family is family. Chuck should understand... that...

It's only as Cas thinks this that he understands.

" _Cas, you're family_..." Sam said when Cas announced that he would be going 'home'. Cas had not realized how much these humans meant that, but now he does.

They have accepted him to the point that they would allow him to usurp the rights of another of their kind to keep him here.

Cas is simultaneously touched and horrified by the gesture.

He feels wetness gathering in his eyes as it had when Dean thought that Cas would die.

"Dean, I cannot-"

"Dude, chill," Dean says, however. He even chuckles as he looks down at Cas with clear affection. "Guy was a vegetable. Popped the holy roller out of 'im like we did all the others, but he didn't come to. He would have been a goner if we didn't put you in."

"So I am alone in here?" This is an eventuality that Cas could not have dared to hope for.

To live... here on earth, with Dean, without sacrificing anyone else's free will to do it-

"Hey, you're not alone," Dean says, planting another kiss on Cas's lips. "Hear me? Never again."

Their friends - no, their family - catcall from around the room. But Dean just laughs them off.

"Here. Get a load of what you look like."

Jo hands Cas a mirror, and he cannot help but laugh when he recognizes the face in his reflection.

The body acquired for him is the body of a healer Cas glimpsed in the city when he and and Sam went to acquire medicines for Ben. It is a body he found himself thinking appreciative thoughts about and that even Dean admitted is not displeasing to the eye.

From their kiss, Cas knows that Dean does not mind Cas's remaining in the body of a male. But it still touches him that Dean would choose for him a male vessel, when the female form was Dean's professed preference at the time that they met. Cas has grown used to being a man, and would not have preferred to adapt to becoming a female, although he can understand how Dean might have been tempted to make that change for him when the opportunity arose.

Cas pulls Dean to him for their next kiss, grateful beyond words for this gesture of acceptance.

"Jeez, guys, I know you're both back from the dead and all, but could you at least wait until we're out of the room?" Sam asks.

Dean makes a gesture that Cas cannot see, and Bobby's gruff laughter tells Cas that it is not one his angel brethren would likely approve of.

Cas smiles as Dean's hands acquaint themselves with Cas's new body - just as Cas adjusts to touching Dean's body from outside of it - and feels like making some inappropriate gestures of his own.

"Just go for it, man," Dean says, lips curling and eyes mischevious as he looks into Cas's face, like he they can still hear one another's thoughts although Cas's mind is silent.

Cas barely hesitates before slipping a hand boldly down the front of Dean's pants.

"Hell, yeah..." Dean groans. And proceeds to make Cas very, very happy to experience another series of firsts in his tenth - and he hopes final - life.

\--~--

It is only six months later when it seems that Cas's miraculous second life on earth is about to come to an end.

They are out collecting supplies - Cas, Dean, Sam, Andy, Jo, Meg, Charlie and Jake.

They seem to be in the clear, nearly out of the city, when they hear the first flutter of wings.

Dean stops singing, mid-verse, and Sam reaches hurriedly over to switch off the car stereo.

Their cellphones all light up.

There's no use answering, however. Seemingly out of nowhere, cars appear, surrounding Dean's Impala, Jake's pickup, and Meg's Mustang.

There's no time to run, either.

Bodies pile out of every vehicle, shielded from scrutiny by the darkness on the other side of the perimeter of headlights that now enclose the convoy.

A single figure steps forward, into the light, where the shadow of his wings stretches out behind him, identifying him undeniably as an angel.

"Holy shit," Sam cusses.

The wing-span on the angel is impressive. This is no sentry that's confronting them. He's old. As old as a soldier like Cas. Maybe as old as an archangel, the most frightening and powerful of angels in Heaven.

"Dean..."

"No matter what, you stay in this car, Cas."

"I will not-"

"The sigils'll hide you."

"But not you. _Dean_ -"

Dean is already stepping out of the Impala, as Sam is also; as Meg and Charlie are out of the Mustang. Andy and Jake climb out of the pickup struggling to shield Jo with their bodies, but she simply rolls her eyes and edges around them, standing beside them as they all face the angel.

Cas joins his family. If the angel does not believe - as many of the garrison do, that the human resistance will simply die out if left alone - and try to take Dean and the others in... They will die rather than let themselves be taken. And Cas would rather die than to survive them.

"Damn it, Cas!" Dean hisses out the side of his mouth as Cas walks up next to him.

"Humans! I knew it!" The angel strides forward a couple of steps. He's slight in stature but the incredible span of his shadow stretches almost all the way across the lighted area created by his fellow angels' cars. "This all of you? Not hiding anything else with those sigils, are you?"

"Back in the car... get back in the car-" Dean is mumbling.

"Why don't you come over here and see for yourself, short stuff?" Meg calls out, even as Charlie tries to shush her. "Baby!"

But there are already footsteps crowding around each of the human's vehicles, the angel's companions searching for more resistance members and angel captives. Cas would have been no more safe in the car at this moment than at Dean's side.

"I am not alone, remember?" he says for Dean's ears only, trying to convey with his words - with his eyes - and the brush of his hand against Dean's that he would have it no other way.

The look on Dean's face is heartbreaking.

"Oh! And what do we have here?" the angel says, obviously spotting Cas at last. "You okay over there, Brother? Or are these mud monkeys holding you against your will?"

The angel is still smirking but there is something very careful and calculating in his eyes and in his tone.

"That's right, we captured him," Sam says immediately, and Dean steps in front of Cas as if he can hide the shadow of Cas's own wings behind his mortal form.

The angel looks at Sam in a way that makes Cas wonder.

But it doesn't change what Cas had been about to say.

"No. I am with them. They are my friends," Cas says, loudly and clearly.

He sees Dean's shoulders slump in front of him, and Jake restrain Jo from lifting her rifle out of the corner of his eye, as the angel confronting them grins, wide and happy.

It's an unsettling sight. At least until his companions begin spilling out of the shadows and into the light next to him.

"Well... that's all we needed to know."

All but one of the fifteen people in his group are-

"Human..." Charlie breathes.

"Oh my g- We thought we were the only ones left!" Andy exclaims.

"So did we... Til we met a coupla other groups," says a skinny guy with a mullet. He's wearing a smirk to rival his angel buddy's.

"I thought Gabriel and I were the only angels who'd switched sides," says a blonde man with a British accent.

Gabriel - the archangel to first greet their convoy - smirks and responds in a way that Cas will learn is quite indicative of the mischevious angel's personality.

"Told you there had to be more of us, didn't I?" he says. "Humans've got candy bars, lap dances, and martinis. Their side is clearly the better side to be on."

"Amen to that," says Dean.

Cas takes his hand and smiles.


End file.
